Nothing beats the source

The documentation on Angular 1 has improved a lot over time, but with Angular one of the goals is to have great documentation from the start. The official documentation site has already a lot of documentation available, including:

But most interestingly a set of very well-written and easy to read Cookbooks

Tips and Tricks for using the official docs

Please bear in mind the following about the official website:

the search functionality is much improved and seems to now be fully functional. Like in any other site in general, if you ever run into delays in auto-completion or prefer to use Google to search it, you can do so by typing site:angular.io your search on Google

The new sections on the Router (The new revamped 3.0 Component Router) and on the new Forms API (post RC2) are now available and make great reads, but do not seem to have been linked in the main menus yet

If you want to see the upcoming docs, check the pull requests for the website on Github

The Angular Subreddit

The best web forum that we have found so far to keep up to date with Angular is the Angular Subreddit. The Angular Gitter chat is also a good place to go but as its really more of a community chat to ask questions in real time:

All the great blog posts on Angular end up in this Subreddit, there are also great discussion threads and the community there is really passionate.

You can see that there are a lot of Help Request threads. Many times you will get very good help here.

If you want to know what happened in Angular in the last week, you just have to go this Subreddit and everything will be there: this Subreddit is literally "The Front Page of Angular".

The Thoughtram Blog

If you are looking for an in-depth blog on Angular, you should really check the Thoughtram Blog Angular Section. This is one of the original Angular blogs that has been posting very high-quality in-depth content since the very first Alphas.

The blog writing style is super clear and the posts are always up to date, the articles are kept updated constantly to the latest Angular releases.

There is a lot of research effort that goes into this blog: the reason why it contains such in-depth content so early is that they try the code very early once features are available, and even before as they are being developed - when there is only the code to figure them out and not much else.

If you only have time to read one Angular blog, this is the one to choose.

ng-book 2

We have read several Angular e-books, if you are looking for an Angular e-book we definitely recommend this one: The ng-book 2:

The content is kept up to date constantly with the new Angular releases. Whole chapters such as the router have been rewritten depending on the changes, the book tracks the framework very closely.

This is a pre-release version that is approximately 95% complete. Updates will be released as they are finished (roughly every week).

Minko Gechev Blog

The Minko Gechev Blog is another great resource for learning and keeping up with Angular. This blog is very in-depth and clearly written. It usually does not focus on a unique feature of Angular and describes it in detail, like the Thoughtram blog does so well.

Instead this is more of a big picture, architecture / tooling / best practices level blog where things like the following topics get discussed in depth:

If you are looking for guidelines for structuring the architecture of your app, or looking to learn the latest on Angular tooling like the offline compiler, this blog is a must read.

Angular Air

The Angular Air podcast and YouTube Channel are a great way to keep up to date with all the latest developments on the Angular world:

Although there are some podcast episodes about Angular 1, the majority of the episodes focus on Angular. The core panelists are very plugged in into whats new in the Angular community as they themselves are the main contributors to Angular Universal and several Angular libraries.

So what is important to realize with this podcast is that its made by frequent conference speakers and developers of parts of the Angular stack themselves, so in many cases, we are getting the information straight from the development source or very close to it.

Members of the Angular core team are frequent guests in this podcast.

Recently on Angular Air - Angular Mobile

Recently the podcast covered Angular mobile development in a 3 episode series:

This podcast is audio only and the episodes are around the 40-50 minutes mark, with the last 10 minutes being the weekly suggestions section. This makes it ideal to hear on your daily commute.

Podcasts and blogs are are a great resource, but further in this post, we will learn about some video tutorial choices, starting with YouTube.

Angular YouTube Channel

It might not be apparent by the way the channel is setup, but one of the best tutorial resources that you will find on the web is the official Angular YouTube Channel:

This channel contains internal presentations on developer meetups at Google, where developers are given early previews of what will sometimes become official talks.

The thing to bear in mind is that each video is the result of a meetup that might contain completely different parts. And the content of the middle and end of the video is not on the title so its does not get indexed very well.

Some hidden gems on the official YouTube Channel

These videos contain some of the best interviews and talks on Angular available (including all the multiple conferences), for example:

this talk on RxJs and Observables by @BenLesh is one of the best around the web. The explanation of the difference between the merge, concat and switch strategies for combining Observables is invaluable. But the video does not index well if you search for the topic via YouTube search

This video gets indexed as an Angular Todo App. But inside is one of the best and most in-depth interview that the core Angular team members have given so far (its the evening of the Alpha announcement)

So again in the case of this channel, you really want to see the whole video, as each video contains a large variety of content. There are many hidden gems here, so yet another reason to subscribe to the channel.

ng-conf YouTube Channel

There are many conferences on Angular, but if you have to choose one take this one, ng-conf:

It's the official Angular conference in the US and the first original Angular conference. The videos and the speakers are top notch and the organizers have chosen a 20 minute format that makes it ideal for learning purposes. The videos are out very quickly after the conference, and conference is live streamed on YouTube each time.

If you have to choose one conference to watch annually, take this one you can't go wrong with this cannel, here is this years playlist.

Angular University

The Angular University provides online tutorials for learning and keeping up with the Angular Ecosystem. This means the framework itself and everything around it, from Typescript to Module Loaders, server-side Angular etc. Check the course pipeline (several courses already available), bellow is a sample:

The goal is to have a series of mini courses on a given topic (Router, Forms, etc.), split in video lessons of less than 5 minutes. A developer will guide you through a framework feature coding example step by step in a conversational way, while still helping to keep the big picture in mind: by mentioning the "Why" and not only the "How".

The format of short conversational video lessons is meant to be easy to consume outside of the prime learning hours of the day. Its much easier to learn something if a fellow developer guides us through it in a pair programming session (plus we have a replay button :-) ).

You will always have the energy to watch a couple of well summarized, focused 5 minute of video a day.

Conclusions

The technology learning landscape is changing under our feet. The pace of evolution is getting faster, but we are at the same time converging. The Javascript community is converging around a couple of MV* frameworks (Angular, React, Ember), and the development on the server is starting to be done more and more in Javascript.

For example with Angular it might be possible and very viable in the future to build our whole application using it (both backend and frontend). More on this on a upcoming post.

To keep up with the changes on the ecosystem, we need something to complement the existing forms of media.

We could use short, well focused video tutorials that must be very easy to consume and very compatible with our jobs and commutes. In short, we could use a summary of what is going on, but we still need to see the code in action.

Other posts on Angular

If you enjoyed this post, here are some other popular posts on our blog: